USGIF GotGeoint BlogUSGIF promotes geospatial intelligence tradecraft and a stronger community of interest between government, industry, academia, professional organizations and individuals focused on the development and application of geospatial intelligence to address national security objectives.

October 14, 2015

A major challenge for infrastructure companies is mapping infrastructure which is obscured by walls, soil or other materials. For example, detecting underground infrastructure is a remote-sensing challenge that is seeing rapid technological progress. Researchers at MIT have developed a prototype low cost, high resolution camera that can see through materials such as walls and plywood that visible and other types of camera can't see through. It can also image objects in 3D. This is very early in the development sequence, but the principle behind the camera is very general and promises to have applications in a number of areas including the infrastructure sector.

The prototype camera uses time of flight to create a 3D image of an object. It operates much the same way that radar and consumer devices such as the XBox Kinect work. The camera sends out bursts of microwaves and then tracks how long it takes for the microwaves to be reflected by something and return to the sensor. From the time of flight of the microwaves and the known speed of the microwave burst, it is possible to calculate the location of the bit of an object that reflected the microwave pulse. The prototype camera has a time resolution of 200 picoseconds (a picosecond is one trillionth of a second). This allows the camera to resolve distances with an accuracy of 6 cm, which is more than adequate for many infrastructure applications.

The camera is also capable of multispectral imaging. This means that it does not take a picture only at one wavelength, but at several. Every 10 milliseconds MIT camera's microwave emitter sweeps through the frequency range of 7.835 GHz to 12.817 GHz. Different material reflect the microwaves differently depending on frequency. The result is an image with different colours that makes it possible to distinguish between different materials.

To test the prototype camera MIT placed a mannequin covered in aluminum foil behind a drywall wall and a sheet of plywood. The aluminum is detectable at the wavelengths used at MIT. The mannequin was placed approximately 2.1 meters in front of the imaging system and the partition approximately 15–30 cm in front of the mannequin.

The camera is comprised of a microwave emitter and a reflector. The reflector is over a meter wide. Acquiring an image takes on the order of an hour. The approach is general enough that the MIT researchers believe that the camera could be made significantly smaller by using shorter wavelengths, millimeter waves instead of microwaves. However, for many infrastructure applications the size of the camera may not be a problem.

September 28, 2015

It is known that Mars has frozen water at its poles and water vapour in its atmosphere. Today researchers associated with NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have identified flowing water on Mars' surface.

Imagery of Mars' surface shows dark streaks that reappear periodically on slopes. These streaks, which appear and grow in the downslope direction during warm seasons when temperatures reach about 250–300 K, are called recurring slope lineae (RSL). By analyzing spectral data from the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars instrument onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter researchers have found evidence for hydrated salts at four separate locations on Mars' surface. They have found that the hydrated salts occur during warm seasons when RSLs are most extensive. This supports the hypothesis that the RSLs represent flowing briny water. The salts in the water prevent it from freezing at temperatures of 250–300 degrees K.

April 10, 2014

April 3 Europe launched the first Sentinel-1A satellite of the €8.4-billion Earth monitoring Copernicus program, which is managed by the European Commission. This was the first of a constellation of six Sentinel families which are scheduled to be launched by the end of the decade. The satellites will provide long-term monitoring of Earth’s land, water and atmosphere. Copernicus will integrate data other satellites, from ocean buoys, weather stations and air-quality monitoring networks.

Copernicus was designed by the European Union (EU) and the European Space Agency (ESA) to help the European Commission and EU member states to develop environmental policies and monitor the results. Its data will be used to create services for practical applications such as ice mapping, agriculture management, climate-change monitoring and prediction and disaster response.

Free and open data

One of the most important aspects of the Copernicus program is that the data collected under the program will be free for anyone to access and use. Scientific researchers and public authorities will be part of a formal program which included dedicated help desks and support.

Ongoing Maintenance

The other important aspect of the Copernicus program is that it is not a one-off, it is a system that will be maintained into the future. Sentinel satellites will be replaced regularly as they age. This will privide data sets that can support longitudinal studies, for example, of the impact of climate change over long time periods.

Sentinel-1 is a constellation of two polar-orbiting satellites, operating 24/7 performing C-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging, enabling them to acquire imagery regardless of the weather.Sentinel-1A was launched April 3. Sentinel 1B is scheduled to be launched in the next 18 months.

Sentinel-2 is a pair of high-resolution imaging devices that are basically advanced Landsat devices with a spatial resolution of about 10 meters and revisit times of 2–3 days at mid-latitudes.

Sentinel-3 will measure sea surface topography, sea and land surface temperature, and ocean and land surface colour with high accuracy and reliability to support ocean forecasting systems, environmental monitoring and climate monitoring.

Sentinel-4 will monitor atmospheric pollutants from a geostationary orbit to provide hourly measurements over most of Europe and North Africa.

March 20, 2014

EarthCube is community-led cyberinfrastructure that will enable data sharing across the geosciences. Its aim is to develop a framework to assist researchers in understanding and predicting the Earth system from the sun to the center of the Earth. The goal of EarthCube is to create a community-driven cyberinfrastructure that will enable global data discovery and knowledge management and achieve interoperability and data integration within and across disciplines.

The Earthcube vision is to transform research and data management practices within the geosciences community over the next decade in order to provide new capabilities, including access to data and visualization tools, to researchers and educators. This initiative will provide a knowledge management framework for the geosciences that will result in improved productivity within the geosciences community and accelerated research on the Earth system.

EarthCube is a collaborative partnership between the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Directorate of Geosciences (GEO) and the Division of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (ACI). It’s also a virtual community with over 2,500 participants, including atmosphere, ocean, computer, information, and social scientists, as well as educators, data managers, and other contributors.

This community has done a great deal of collaborative work since EarthCube was launched in mid-2011. As of September 2013, a new round of NSF awards was made to develop key technologies, promote community building, explore integrative systems, and prototype a governance structure.

In addition to the funded project teams, several Special Interest Groups are in place as virtual teams working together on EarthCube-related projects.

Early in March of this year an EarthCube IT/CS/FOSS Stakeholder Assembly Workshop was held in Boulder, CO. The workshop was intended to bring together members of the computer and information science communities, as well as representatives from industry and free and open source software communities.

September 01, 2011

With 90,029 confirmed registrations, Ontario has reached a new record for the number of incoming undergraduates according to the Ontario Universities' Application Centre. Enrollment in Ontario has been increasing every year since 2004 and the Council on Ontario Universities has suggested that an increase in workforce demand has been driving the increasing enrollment. (2003 was a unique year in Ontario as the province switched to a 12 year from a 13 year high school schedule.)

In Ottawa job-focused programs, such as science and engineering and business programs in particular, are seeing increasing enrollment. Carleton University has seen an enrolment jump for the bachelor of computer science, bachelor of information technology, engineering and sciences programs. Carleton has introduced new programs including a bachelor of engineering in architectural conservation and sustainability, new commerce concentrations in supply chain management and entrepreneurship and a bachelor of computer science mobile computing stream. At the University of Ottawa life sciences, engineering and health sciences are the most popular in terms of the number of applications and the number accepted.

August 22, 2011

As I have blogged recently, advanced economies are facing a shortage of skilled labour. This is partly the result of an aging workforce, but also results from decreasing enrollment in technical courses at the high school, vocational institute, community college and university levels. With the respect to the latter probelm, there appears to be signs of a change in the UK.

According to the BBC, in the UK applications for all university courses are up, but science and engineering courses are especially popular. Applications for physics courses at university are up by more than 17% over last year. Recently published statistics also show that in 2011 the the number of students studying A-level physics has increased by over 6%. This represents the fifth consecutive year that of increase. According to the Institute of Physics physics is among the top ten most popular subjects for the first time since 2002.

But in the last decade enrollment in mathematics and science has been down significantly in the UK. A comparison of 24 countries showed that England, Wales, and Northern Ireland were the only ones in which fewer than 20% of students study mathematics post-16. 40% of companies are reported as saying that they are having difficulty recruiting people with science, technology, engineering and maths skills.